Theosophy - A world Religion by Annie Besant - Adyar Pamphlets No. 72
Adyar Pamphlets No.72
A
World Religion
by Annie Besant
A
lecture delivered at Glasgow on 6th June, 1911
Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar. Madras India
December 1916
[Page 1] AMONG the many names with which the love and reverence of man
have appealed to the Supreme Being, there is none perhaps more full of
significance, none whose implications are more important, than the well-known Masonic title, The Great Architect of the Universe . An architect is
not a builder; an architect is one who plans, and who hands over his plan to
many others to carry out bit by bit, stone by stone; but, under all the
diversities of the many builders, under all the movement and whirl of a
great mass of workmen, all are moving to a single end, all are contributing
to the carrying out of a single plan, to make an idea manifest in material
matter to the world when the plan is carried out in form.
Now
there are many ways of reading history. Sometimes in the school a mere
mass of dates and names, utterly uninteresting, a matter of memory and
not of thought, is given as history; but that is not history; that is only
the dry bones, the [Page
2] skeleton, of
history; and the one that has only read history in that way knows nothing of
its reality and its teaching. Or again you might read history a little more
wisely; not thinking only of the names of Kings and statesmen, but realizing
the movements of peoples, understanding the great forces by which
nations rise, rule and fall, and so play their part in the theater of the world;
but even that is not history in its deepest sense. It is still the corpse. The
muscles are there; the nerves are there; the skin, the features are there;
but it is a dead body and not a living one. You only begin to understand the
fascination, the enthralling interest of history, when you see the events on
earth as the projections thrown down on to the earth of spiritual realities in
higher and mightier worlds. When you begin to see in the events of history
the working of a mighty plan; the shaping of a great purpose; the carrying
out down here of the thoughts conceived in the spiritual world; then your
body becomes alive, then the form takes on the attribute of the living man
pulsing with life. History rises up before you, and you realize that the outer
events are but the shadow of the realities, and that the realities that cast
the shadows are the spiritual truths of the universe. And as that thought
begins to show itself, history becomes illuminated, and the outlines of the
plan shine through the tangle of events. Even looking back say a century
and a quarter, how different was the world then; how separated in its parts;
how ignorant the nations of each other; how [Page
3] profound the darkness
which veiled the East from the West and the West from the East ! From
time to time before that, as in the reign of Elizabeth, a stray traveler may
have gone over to the eastern lands and brought back some message of
the wonders there, of delicate art, of exquisite craftsmanship, of treasures
which dazzled the imagination of the West; but those travelers, few and far
between, knew nothing of the thoughts of the people, though they admired
their handiwork; knew nothing of the religions that they followed; nothing of
the philosophy that they studied; nothing of the Scriptures on which their
lives were built. It was scarcely more than one hundred and twenty years
ago when first a touch of eastern science was brought over to western
lands, when the great Maire of Paris, Bailly, who perished later in the Reign
of Terror first drew the attention of Europe to the marvelous astronomy of
the East. Then there came over some of the stories of the popular faith,
copyings of some of the pictures, the sculptures, used in the temples of
that ancient faith. There you have the beginning the foundation, of the
science called Comparative Mythology, which in the last century has
received such an enormous impulse by the researches of the archaeologist
and the antiquarian.
You
find in some of the earlier books of the nineteenth century the beginnings
of that Free Thought movement, which gradually blended with scientific
materialism, and made a dangerous foe, menacing the very life of Religion.
Some of the books which still are [Page
4] classics came from
France, especially towards the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of
the nineteenth century. Then, a little later, Englishmen joined in the study.
But still the best of the East did not come over here: only some of the
religious stories and many of the external superstitions came. It was only
comparatively lately, in the days of Max Müller, when that splendid series
of the Sacred Books of the East was published, that gradually the
European mind awakened to the world-treasures of philosophy and wisdom
that lay buried in the literature of the East. The German philosophers had
touched upon it. Emerson, the famous American essayist, possessed the
one copy that existed in America in his day of that now well-known Hindû
Scripture, The Song Celestial.
Since
that time how great the change! Every educated man knows something of the
sacred literature of the Hindû, of the Buddhist, of the
Chinese, has tried to read, and endeavored to grasp and understand;
and now we find in the Universities they are beginning to have chairs of
Oriental Literature, so that eastern knowledge and western knowledge may
supplement each other instead of being regarded as antagonistic to each
other; and you can see, if you look through that century, the wonderful
change that has come in two directions. First, the gradual bringing of India
under the rule of Great Britain, and the familiarizing of Great Britain with
the Indian thought of the past and of the present; on the other hand, the
uprising of the[Page
5] far East, grappling in a death
struggle with a western nation — the war between Russia and Japan, which
left the great eastern Power triumphant. Can you catch under that no glimpse
of a plan, no working of a determinate end, in guiding the East and West along
the road beneficial to humanity at large ? Is it not true that the eastern and
western minds are drawing together, the one philosophically metaphysical, the
other fond of every science that deals with matter ? How that eastern mind,
subtle and spiritual, is gradually becoming wedded to the western mind,
scientific and practical, seeking to turn discoveries and knowledge to the
practical prosperity of man. How the eastern ideals are again taking their
place, tempered with the practicality of the West. How the eastern lack of
public spirit is gradually being made good by the altruism and the public
spirit and the patriotism of the West. How Britain is working in India; how
India is re-acting on Britain; until you can see gradually forming, amid the
dust and the turmoil of the present, the outlines of a mighty World-Empire,
with East and West together; mighty World-Powers linking, and marching
side by side, until India shall no longer be a constant menace, a danger in
the moment of Britain's weakness, but shall be a buttress and a strength;
the oldest and the youngest branches of the Âryan family joining hands
in one mighty Empire, which, by the peace it will make, will offer a fit field
for the spread, for the teaching, of a World-Religion.[Page
6]
All
religions now have passed, for all really educated and thoughtful persons,
out of the stage in which they tried to convert each other into the stage
when they try to understand and learn from each other. All religions are
different with a purpose. If great truths are to express themselves fully,
it cannot be through a single faith, nor by a single intellectual presentment;
and if you will look for a moment at the religions of the world as a whole,
you will find that every religion strikes a different note, and not one of these
notes is to be spared in the making of the mighty chord which shall arise
from humanity to God. For religion is the search for God, and every religion
gives us a letter of His Name; and only when the rivalries are over and
each religion is speaking out its letter, will the mighty Name shine out
complete, through the contribution that every faith has made. The most
cursory glimpse of the world's faiths, living and dead, will convince you of
the truth of what I say. For every one of them gives out a different note.
Every one of them contributes something special to the making of the
World-Religion of the future. Not in monotone but in chords and harmony
comes out the great revelation of God to man. One religion would be a
monotone. The world's religions make a full harmonious chord. And think
how different is the dominant idea that goes out from every faith. Think of
Hindûism, the oldest of the world's religions. One of your own Scotch
divines, who lived for a very long time in India as a [Page
7] missionary, and
founded the great Christian College at Madras, Dr. Miller, has said what, in
his opinion, is the contribution of Hindûism to the religious thought of
the world. He summed it up as the proclamation of the Immanence of God and
the Solidarity of Man. In those two phrases you have but one truth, for if
God be immanent in all, then the lives animated by a single life must form
one vast solidarity. The one life in all means the brotherhood of the many.
Only when we realise that God is seen in everything, do we feel that all that
lives belongs to that single life.
Then
from Pãrsîism comes out the note of Purity, purity of thought,
of word, of deed. That is the formula that every Pãrsî repeats
day by day as he ties his sacred thread. And Buddhism gives right knowledge,
right understanding, right thinking. That is the great message of Buddhism
to the world. Greece speaks of Beauty, and Rome speaks of Law, and the
message of Egypt is Science. Christianity gives the message of Self-sacrifice;
Judaism that of Righteousness; and so on, one after another. You see that
every religion has its special idea that it gives to the religion of the
future, and of all those pearls of truth not one must be lacking when religion's
great necklace of jewels is placed round the neck of humanity.
So, looking thus at the religions as each contributing its own thought above
all others; realising that the political and social condition of the world is
gradually making an area where the World-Religion can grow up, let us
next ask what would be the [Page 8] conditions of such a religion, and what
its special gifts to the world ?
First
of all, I do not believe that the religions of the time will disappear
as religions. I believe that they will be related to the World-Religion,
as, say, the various Churches of Christendom are related to Christianity.
It is just as you find many a Church, many a sect, just as you find many
varieties of thought and teaching; but they all look up to the Christ as
the supreme Teacher, and accept His gospel as the foundation of their message.
So in the World-Religion, the great religions will still exist, each one
appealing to a special type and a a special temperament of mankind, existing
as sects of a single Faith, existing as branches of a single tree, realizing
their fundamental unity, but preserving their valuable diversity; for by
construction and not by destruction will come the fulfilling of the great
religious law. For surely diversity is the very condition of a universe and of
all its beauty. One expression of truth could never exhaust the contents of
a spiritual truth. The intellect divides, separates, classifies; it can never
give the full rounded All of the sum which is Truth. A part of it, a fragment
of it, an aspect of it — yes — that the intellectual presentment
can give; but we need to have them all, in order that the many-faced truth
may shine out for the helping and teaching of man.
So
I look for a great World-Religion where each religion will have its place,
where each great faith will present its own aspect of the truth; but where
we all [Page
9] shall learn from every faith the
special view it has to teach, and so widen our minds, enlarge our hearts, and
deepen our reverence for the greatness of the truth.
Looking
for a moment at that conception, how shall we find that which unites ?
How shall we discover the method by which the intellectual presentment
shall find a common origin in the spiritual truth ? I will take two illustrations
to show you exactly what I mean, and they are closely connected with each
other. I spoke of the different ways of reading history. Let me take for
a moment one great drama played on the stage of the world, familiar to
you all — the life of the Christ. Now there are two ways in
which you may regard it. One tends to divide, the other tends to unite. You
may take it purely and entirely as the history of one Man, however divine. A
life led in the face of the world, great, inspiring, noble, but only a single
life, however divine, with a single life's contents. Round that idea there
has been much of controversy, much of struggle, much of antagonism.
Questions of scholarship arise, the age of documents, the various
readings, how long this manuscript has existed, what particular date can be
given to that manuscript, come down or discovered perhaps in some
church ruin, some ancient monastery. There is all the turmoil of intellectual
strife, all the arguing of scholars and controversialists, everything which
makes for controversy and nothing which makes for inspiration. Now it is a
story of a single life. Most [Page
10] people agree now that the idea
put forward by Strauss that the Christ-story is a myth is entirely out of court.
That was one of the lines of attack very popular in the last century, but I
doubt if any scholar today thinks for one moment that the Christ did not
really exist on the stage of history, and teach and preach in Palestine. It is
the history then of a life which had the most enormous effect upon
mankind. But is that all it is ? Or is there something deeper and greater
which shall unite where scholarship and criticism divide ? Never yet did a
great spirit live on earth and live a life which was His alone, with no bearing
upon His brethren, with no touching of the mankind to which He came.
There is a deeper meaning in the history of the Christ, in which that life
shines out in parable and drama, as it were. It is the story of the experience
of every human Spirit, as he unfolds from seed into flower and fruit. It was
declared by a great Teacher that Christ is the “first-born among many
brethren“; it is declared that all men are partakers of the divine Nature; and
surely that history loses nothing of its charm, if below the history of one
man, however divine, you see your own history as you shall lead it, as you
gradually rise from the carnal to the spiritual, and begin to realise the
possibilities that lie latent in the Spirit that is man. Then the whole unfolding
of that story becomes the expression of a great mystical truth. The birth of
the Christ in Bethlehem stands for the birth of the Christ in every one who
is rising into realised [Page
11] divinity, in every one of those
in whom S. Paul's phrase is being realised: “My little children, of whom I
travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you“. Then you begin to see
in that birth the birth of the Christ. In every human Spirit you begin to see
the growth in favour with God and man. You see the Spirit in the moment of baptism,
when the life flows down upon him from above. You see him in the glory of
transfiguration, when the human Spirit begins to realise his own divinity.
You see him in the agony of the passion, when the soul approaching Deity
finds out its human weakness, and agonises in the last ordeals of the Saint.
You see him risen and ascended in the man who has attained the full
stature of the Christ. And so you realise, however historical the story, it has
a deeper spiritual meaning which underlies the whole, that Christ was living
the story of all mankind, as well as a single life in Palestine two thousand
years ago. Now it is that mystical story that unites: it is true for all men
of every faith, true for all in their upward climb, true for all in their realisation
of divinity within themselves; and then it becomes an inspiration, the most
potent that man can have for realising the unity.
He
also realises through that the possibility of a personal achievement; and
then for the first time the words of Christ become literally possible of
fulfilment: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is
perfect". For a man that is only man, that command must remain for ever
unfulfilled; but [Page
12] for a man in whom the seed of
God is sown, there is no perfection impossible for him as he passes from strength
to strength.
That is the mystical interpretation, and the religion of the future must be
based on Mysticism. See how that is carried out in one of the dogmas of
the Churches in regard to the Atonement. See how it shows how much of
truth there is in it, and, how much of human error has veiled the spiritual
truth. For in the ideal of Christ as an external Saviour, however exquisitely
beautiful and lovable from the standpoint of those He helps, there is always
some feeling of unrest, of disturbance, inasmuch as some one outside is
the Helper, and gives us that which we do not realise for ourselves. But in
the mystical view of the Atonement with the birth of Christ in the human
Spirit, it is a Christ within instead of a Christ without. It is the unfolding of a
life, instead of the imputation of the righteousness of another. There is
nothing of legality, nor contract, nor materialism, but the opening up of a life
that transforms, and makes atonement because it transforms man into
God.
You
may say: Are you against religious dogma ? No. Dogma has its place in
all teaching of truth. Science has it, just as much as religion. It is
quite dogmatic to say that if you put hydrogen and oxygen together at a
certain temperature they will combine. A statement of truth imposed by
authority from outside, that is what dogma is, and any such statement of
truth is necessary for learning and for teaching. That is what critics
of religious dogmas [Page
13] very often forget. But
a dogma, not to be mischievous, must be based on experience and verifiable
by experience, and that is sometimes the weak point of religious dogma;
but it ought not to be so. All the great religious dogmas are based on
experience, though not on the experience of modern people; but that is
the fault of modern people and not the fault of the dogma. Every great
spiritual truth thrown into dogmatic form and imposed on the awed man by
Church, or Pope, or Book, has its origin in human experience in relation
to divinity. For the religious consciousness is universal and the great
dogmas of the faiths of the world are built on that testimony of the religious
consciousness of mankind.
You
say: How do you know it ? Because you find them in every faith. You find
them in every age. Every nation possesses the same truths although in different
words, the same great fundamental truths on which every religion is based.
They are common truths, and they have been known by the experience of man
in touch with the invisible worlds.
Now
there is no reason in the world why you should not again be able to verify
these truths for yourselves, as in a moment I will show you; but what I
want to put to you now is that the difference between the man who accepts
the dogma and the Mystic is this: the authority of the receiver of the
dogma is outside him, and he has no knowledge which verifies the dogma;
but the Mystic knows the truth by sight. The Spirit has faculties as well
as the body. There is a science of the [Page
14] Spirit as much as
physical science. The Spirit can gain knowledge experimentally as well as
the body, and when a man has reached a certain stage of evolution he
needs no other authority to teach him religious truth, for within the depths
of his own Spirit there wells up the truth which the other sees from the
outside, and an inner authority and not an outer authority reveals the truth
that the Mystic knows. He does not believe in God because the Church
says: God is. He believes in God because he has found God within
himself, and the Spirit knows that is where God is, and naught can ever
shake that knowledge. The dogma standing on authority may be
undermined by other authority. The dogma based not on demonstration but
on a Church or a Book may be shaken to pieces when other books are
read and other religions are looked into; but your own knowledge, your own
experience, your own realisation of the Deity within you which makes you
able to recognise the Deity without you, that nothing can shake; for it is
your very own, and you know it, you hold it, and if alt the world were to rise
against you, it would not be shaken. That is the position of the Mystic. He
knows Christ within him. There is the Spirit that is knowledge; and he
recognises that which agrees with the key note of his own Spirit.
For there is but one Spirit in many bodies, one Life in many forms, one God
in many temples; and so there comes to be but one word and one
knowledge, and that belongs equally to all who will to know [Page 15] and not
only to believe, to unfold within themselves the faculty of knowledge which
lies within the Spirit of every son of man.
Now
Mysticism unites, for all the Mystics of the world agree on the fundamentals
of the spiritual consciousness. Dogmatists quarrel; Mystics reinforce each
other; and on the development of the Spirit in man the religion of the
future must depend. Those grow into knowledge; they will be the pillars
of the religion of the future: and dogma will have its proper place in
the teaching of the younger and inexperienced, until they have grown into
religious manhood. So the mischief of dogma will disappear. It will take
its rightful place as part of the education, the religious education, of
the man. The dogmas will be taught in many forms in the different faiths,
and the one mystical truth they embody will be taught in the religion,
the World-Religion, as expressed in different ways in the Churches.
But
another thing that religion must give us is a science of religion. If religion
be true, each of you has those faculties I spoke of, which are to the
Spirit what the senses are to the body, and the reasoning mind to the intelligence.
It is part of the duty of religion to teach us how to unfold those faculties
in ourselves in order that we may know, and religions do teach it and have
taught it, only it has slipped so much out of sight today. Useful as was
much that was done in the Reformation, priceless as is the importance of
the assertion of Liberty of Thought and Liberty of Judgment, one [Page
16] great harm was done to
Christianity by that movement. It robbed the protesting communities of
much of that occult knowledge which had come down from the days of the
Apostles and the Disciples in the unbroken succession of the Church of
Rome. The teachings of the Roman Church today contain far more occult
science than is found in the bishops and the clergy of the communities
that take the name of Protestants. It has methods of teaching, methods
of training, ways of meditating, which in every great faith are the only
ways of awakening those faculties which enable you to know and not only
to believe. The faith which leads to man's perfection is laid down in some
great Roman Catholic manuals, and it is identical in its stages, its beginnings
and its endings with that same faith as taught in Buddhist treatises, as
laid down in the Hindû science of Yoga.
You might take what you like there, and you will find the teaching the same,
the discipline the same, the
methods of progress the same, only the words are different. Rome speaks of purification
as the first step of that faith. The Hindû and the Buddhist call it the
probationary path, on which certain qualifications are to be gained and the qualifications
are given one by one exactly, as what is wanted to control and to discipline
the moods of the mind and to make a man calm and pure and strong. Then you come
to the next step which Rome calls the path of Illumination. The Hindû and
the Buddhist call it the path of Initiation, and mark out the various stages
on the path, all the great Initiations through which [Page
17] the disciples pass. The
ending for both the Roman calls Union, the Hindû and the Buddhist call
Liberation, but in both cases it means the realisation of Divinity, the union
of the human Spirit with the divine. A few months ago I was reading with
some care a Roman Catholic treatise that any one of you might read with
the greatest profit, if you care at all about the scientific side of Mysticism.
It is written by a Jesuit father, and in the translation is called The Graces
ofInterior Prayer. It has received the approval of the Pope and of some
of the high officials of the Roman Catholic Church. Now in that book, at the
end of it, in dealing with Union, the writer speaks of the deification of man,
man become divine, the union between God and man, so close, so utter, that
man is deified. Now I confess I was surprised to find a phrase so strong
outside the Theosophical, Hindû and Buddhist treatises. I did not know
that Rome would go so far in explaining what the end of the path connoted,
and then I remembered that I ought to have known it, for one of the great
teachers of the Church, S. Ambrose, gave the noble sentence: “Become
what you are“. Does it sound a paradox ? It contains a great and profound
meaning. Become the manifested God that you are already in seed and in
germ; for, if you think for a moment, you cannot become that which you
are not. Only that which exists in you in possibility can ever be manifested
by you in actuality. You must have it within before it can show itself without,
and in that great [Page
18] sentence of S. Ambrose the idea
of the universal religion is declared. The human Spirit is divine, the offspring
of God. Become then in outer manifestation that which you are in inner reality;
and the World-Religion of the future will bring out the way again in sight of
the people, will show them how to walk; it will lead them into a knowledge of
their own Divinity; mystical in its teaching, so that the teaching can be translated
by all the religions into the varied dogmas; scientific with the knowledge of
the Spirit, so that men may learn to develop the spiritual faculties and then
use them for the perfecting of their own nature; with no antagonists, for it
will be universal; with no quarrels within it, for it will be all-inclusive.
That mighty World-Religion is to be proclaimed by the supreme Teacher, the Teacher
of Angels and of Men; that, in very truth, is on the threshold: its foot is at
the door. Look around you, and you will see the signs of the change. Look abroad
over the world, and you will recognise that mighty synthesis is coming, into
which, all the world-faiths shall be built and know themselves as one. When religious
hatreds have passed, when religious controversies have disappeared, when men
have learned the supreme truth so often preached, so little practiced: “Let
him that loveth God love his brother also“; when out of the World-Religion has
grown the World-Peace; when out of the World-Faith has grown the World-Service;
then religion shall be what it ought to be, the helper of the downtrodden, [Page
19] the protector of the weak, the
teacher of the ignorant, the raiser of the fallen; then religion will not only
tie man to God but man to man, and it will be realized that knowledge of God
is best expressed in Service to Man.